1928 - Okeechobee

By Liz Doup and Staff Writer

|Sun-Sentinel|

Sep 11, 1988 | 3:00 AM

Flood in the Belle Glade area after the 1928 storm. (Historical Society of Palm Beach)

When the hurricane roared ashore at Palm Beach September 16, 1928, many coastal residents were prepared. But inland, along Lake Okeechobee, few conceived the disaster that was brewing. The storm struck first in Puerto Rico, killing 1,000 people, then hit Florida with 125 mph winds. Forty miles west of the coast, rain filled Lake Okeechobee to the brim and the dikes crumbled. Water rushed onto the swampy farmland, and homes and people were swept away. Almost 2,000 people perished.

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IT'S THE DETAILS -- still sharp-edged after all these years -- that shape the picture: how bone-chilling floodwaters swirled around their knees, how shrieking winds smothered cries for help, how pelting rain felt like needles piercing skin.

Pay attention, please, to the details they offer, no matter how painful a picture they create. What conclusions you draw must come from what they tell you today, because the big picture of the big storm isn't all that clear.

How many died in that terrible tragedy?

No one knows for certain, though estimates range from 1,770 to 2,300. People searched, but they didn't find all the bodies and couldn't identify many of those they did. Helen McCormick, 13 at the time, remembers men cradling babies -- dead babies -- in their arms. ``Are these your children?`` they asked the people who passed by.

And where are they buried, these victims of the storm?

Some here, some there, some lost forever to the sawgrass and muck. Vernie Boots remembers his mother saying to the family, ``Stay together.`` Later, they found his father's body and his brother's body, but they never found his mother.

How strong was the wind?

How can anyone know? Strong enough to push Carmen Salvatore's house clean off its foundation and break it apart like a cheap toy. Strong enough to hurl Gerry Grimes` kitchen sink into another room and punch it into a wall. Strong enough to twist Ella Salvatore's dress around her body till it almost bound her like a rope.

How did you survive when so many others died?

How can they tell you? How can they know? Was it sheer luck or good fortune or maybe the hand of God?

One by one, they try to answer these questions, fit pieces together and make some sense of what happened. Vernie Boots` voice breaks; Helen McCormick's eyes well up. After all this time, memories packing a hurricane's force still take them back to that night, now 60 years past.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1928 -- a hurricane hit the Caribbean, then moved onward and upward to Florida's Atlantic coast. From Fort Pierce to Palm Beach, buildings shattered and splintered as the big wind blew, but its final fury was spent on the tiny farming communities that dot Lake Okeechobee's southern shore.

In roughly six hours -- no one knows exactly how long -- winds churned the water in that shallow lake, the humble muck dike broke and a wall of water spilled out of the lake with the destructive force of a tidal wave.

In a matter of hours, towns from Clewiston to Canal Point -- home to 6,000 people -- were awash in a sea of disaster.

Weeks later, they were still digging out. Years later, they were still rebuilding. Decades later, the `28 storm and its aftermath still color Florida's past -- and its future.

Often called the third worst disaster in American history (the 1889 Johnstown flood and the 1900 Galveston hurricane took more lives), the storm brought the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to South Florida for its first major flood- control effort. A looming dike, as high as 45 feet in some places, was built to contain the waters. But the massive dike also meant that man, not nature, would control the water that nourishes South Florida and its people.

In effect, the storm changed the Glades -- and South Florida -- forever.

Ironically, for all its impact and ecological implications, the storm is anonymous -- it has no official name. It is known only by its date and for its destruction.

To the people in the Glades, it will always be the night 2,000 died.

THE STORM

Her mother did not want to leave the house. That, Helen McCormick remembers with a clarity not clouded by time. If there's going to be a storm, she remembers her mother saying, we'll be safer in the house than running away in a car.

And so they gathered, Helen's family and aunts, uncles, cousins -- 19 in all -- at her stepfather's house in a small settlement north of Belle Glade called Chosen.

Around 8:30 at night, the hurricane's eye passed over the lake's southeast corner. Maybe 30 minutes later the 5-foot dike, built to protect crops from summer rains, not full-blown chaos, gave way in Belle Glade and sent 6 feet of water pouring into the town.

At McCormick's home, someone cut an escape hatch in the roof. The piano was moved under the hole and up they climbed to escape the rising water. The house, knocked off its foundation and moving with the raging flood, twisted and turned while McCormick hung on -- for her life.

``I was holding on to the roof and calling out to my mother. First me, then my brother. I'd say, `Mama, are you there?` and she'd answer, until after a while she didn't answer anymore.``

The house turned upside down and Helen went under water but didn't panic. ``My stepfather had told me that I was safer under the water than above it.`` When she emerged, she wasn't hurt. ``I remember the rain; I thought it would beat me to death,`` she says. But in the end she survived and so did her stepfather. Seventeen members of her family, including her mother, last seen on the rooftop clutching Helen's baby brother, did not.

Her family, like most of the casualties, probably drowned in the deluge. It was dark, the water swift and sudden, and it only took an hour after the dike gave way for floodwaters to peak at a fatal 12 feet.

Chunks of the dike ``big as a house`` knocked down whatever, or whomever, fell in their path. Custard apple trees were uprooted and limbs torn lose. Houses crumbled, timber flew. Some victims disappeared, washed into the Everglades, never to be found again. Gauges measuring wind velocity blew away after recording 96 mph but the wind grew harder and harsher until, some say, it reached 150 mph and was tearing houses apart.

In Pahokee, north of Belle Glade, 9-year-old Gerry Grimes and family abandoned their home and waited out the storm in another house Grimes` father had built four years before. The wind blew so hard it threatened to cave in a bedroom wall where brother-in-law Duncan Padgett lay ill. Confined to his bed, he could only watch -- and hope -- while family members reinforced the heaving wall with two-by-fours.

At Sebring Farm near South Bay, Vernie Boots huddled with family and dozens of others in the sturdiest-looking farmhouse in the area. Still, the house moved off its foundation and, floating on wind-tossed water, pushed up against a roadbed, bouncing off it like a ball. It hit once more, bounced back, then started to fall apart.

Boots, 14 at the time, hung on to the roof, which had broken free from the house and began a horrifying ride through relentless wind and sheets of rain. On hands and knees he kept circling the roof, leaning into the wind so he wouldn't be blown off.

Not until midnight did the storm finally lose its rage. Two or three hours later, the winds started to die. Only then did Boots find two of his brothers, clinging as mightily as he was to the same chunk of roof.

To this day, he doesn't linger on the fate of his mother, who never was seen again, or his father and another brother, whose bodies eventually were found. Only seven of the 63 who gathered in that home lived to see the morning sun, and three of them were the young Boots brothers.

``We were lucky,`` he says, his voice breaking again. ``Some of us survived.``

THE AFTERMATH

It`s difficult burying people in the Glades. Something to do with the water table, locals say, and the peculiarities of muck. In a word, coffins float; it's hard to keep them in the ground.

But something had to be done with all those bodies. And it had to be done quickly.

``Bodies were stacked like cordwood,`` shrugs Carmen Salvatore, 32 when the hurricane hit. ``Piled up like cordwood at the Pahokee dock. No caskets that I remember, just bodies.``

In the beginning, a few dozen were sent to West Palm Beach, where a steam shovel dug a mass grave in Woodlawn Cemetery for the white victims. Hundreds of black farm workers (those living in shacks and shanties were virtually wiped out by the storm) were buried in a cemetery for blacks. Days later, a much bigger grave for more than 1,000 victims was dug in Port Maraca, 10 miles north of Canal Point, on higher, sandy soil.

In the end, that wasn't good enough or fast enough.

``After about the fifth day, we couldn't handle it, not with the heat and humidity. You couldn't identify them, and we had to burn them,`` Salvatore says.

The bodies had to be destroyed; they were a hazard that threatened the very survival of the survivors. Though history books tell of the stench of rotting flesh and of lime poured over decaying bodies, those images are lost on Salvatore.

``In the Glades, with the humidity and rotting vegetation, you always had a certain stink in the air,`` he says, matter of factly. ``And lime? I don't remember. We used diesel fuel to help the bodies burn.``

For the living, Salvatore did whatever he could, whatever he was asked. Supplies came in from the coast and volunteers handed out clothes, started repairing houses and cooking food for the homeless. He remembers a fire pit, as long as his house, cooking government rations of tomatoes, rice, beans and an occasional ham.

For a couple of days after the storm, Gerry Grimes and her family survived on a can of sweet syrup -- too heavy to wash out of their home, which was flooded -- and a loaf of bread bought from someone who'd broken into a grocery store. She remembers the wreckage, but not the bodies. She remembers pulling nails from her feet after stepping on stray timber, but the pain was only temporary. Mostly she remembers that in 3 feet of water outside her family's back door, fish miraculously appeared as if for her pleasure, and she'd catch them and put them in cans or old bottles.

``I had the best time,`` she says, before stopping at the sound of her enthusiastic voice. ``But, of course, I was just a child.``

THE MEMORY

The black and white pictures are enclosed in plastic, tucked away and safe from harm. It`s all Helen McCormick has left of her family -- a few aging photographs and her childhood memories.

``I've never been to their West Palm gravesite because how do I know they're really there?`` she asks. ``I have no desire ... I can't even feel certain ... I'm sure they're not buried together.``

After the storm, her stepfather gathered up what little was left of their house and gave it to one of his workers so that he could rebuild. McCormick was packed off to her grandmother's home in another part of the state.

``I walked away from it that morning,`` she says, ``and never saw any of it again.``

A few years later, when McCormick returned to Belle Glade to live, the obvious chaos created by the storm had faded. But over the years, other reminders were put in place.

In front of Belle Glade's library on heavily traveled Main Street is a memorial sculpture of a family fleeing the storm. Hoover Dike is a constant reminder of the past. And at Port Mayaca Cemetery, a simple headstone on the mass grave carries the words:

``To the 1,600 pioneers in this mass burial who gave their lives in the `28 hurricane so that the Glades might be as we know it today.``

And along with man-made reminders, nature offers one of her own.

``Every hurricane season, it reminds you,`` McCormick says. ``And if a hurricane really hits ... it reminds you. You never get over something like that.``

Read the story from the Fort Lauderdale Daily News September 17, 1928.